The video rental store as “third place”. “Decades before recommendation algorithms, video stores served as social hubs where conversation and camaraderie became a form of taste-making.”

This image was tweeted out by the NASA Europa Mission account the other day:

One of these images is of Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon, and the other eight are frying pans. Can you pick Europa out? Hint: frying pans tend not to have impact craters.

Update: The photos of the frying pans were taken by Christopher Jonassen, whose work I featured back in 2011 (which I had totally forgotten about). At the time, I even joked about the pans looking like a Jovian moon. kottke.org is a flat circle. (thx, tony)

[This is a vintage post originally from Aug 2015.]

Tags: astronomy · Christopher Jonassen · Europa · Jupiter · NASA · space · timeless posts

The End of Google Search. The internet giant is “changing the formula” of its products and media folks are beginning to assume that there will be no search traffic in the future…and fretting about their survival.

Media Matters: “ABC, CBS, and NBC aired a combined 194 segments about the three major heat events” that hit the US this summer and not a single one of them mentioned climate change. Not one!

Fun little review by Marcin Wichary of a 1984 flying video game called Sopwith, which was never supposed to be released to the public (an event that the game’s creator didn’t learn about until years later).

I love this little video of burbling pasta sauces (sound on). Wish there was a 10-hour YT version for work background noise…

I’d Be Lead Harpooner on the Pequod If It Wasn’t for These DEI Hires. “I’m just telling you that it’s getting hard out there for us blue-collar Nantucket lads when all the ships’ owners are catching the Abolitionist Mind Virus.”

25 things that explain America, including personal injury lawyer advertisements, Crest Whitestrips, Costco rotisserie chicken, and the Pizza Hut lamp. “The T-shirt cannon merges three American obsessions: guns, sports and freebie giveaways.”

This is a completely fantastic look at how the Enigma Machine works. Jared Owen constructed a 3D model of the German cipher device and clearly walks the viewer through how the electricity flows through the machine to scramble and unscramble secret messages.

When electricity travels through one rotor it changes the letter once. But remember, we have three of these rotors and they each have different wirings on the inside. When electricity travels through all three of them it changes the letter three times.

Then at the end, we have the reflector. This also has 26 metal contacts. Inside is more wiring that connects the letters in pairs. So it goes in as one letter and then comes out as another letter.

To the right of here is the input wheel. It has 26 wires that go in and connects to the 26 metal contacts.

Let’s put this all together. Electricity flows through one of the 26 wires, let’s say the wire for the letter Y. Then it gets changed to a different letter at all three rotors. Then it hits the reflector, which again, changes the letter. And then it goes back through the rotors again which changes the letter three more times. And it comes back out on a wire that represents a completely different letter. And if you were counting, this means the letter was changed seven times.

Seriously, this is one of the best explanations I’ve ever seen of anything on YouTube — by the end of it, I was pretty sure I could now build an Enigma Machine if I needed to. (via benn jordan)

Tags: Enigma machine · Jared Owen · video

How Wildfire Smoke Is Reshaping Childhood. “Repeated smoke events are changing children’s daily routines, limiting opportunities for outdoor play and social interaction and reshaping how many families experience summer.”

This guy hooked his hamster’s wheel up to Strava — Mollie is logging 5-6 miles per day.

Astronomers have measured the size of the largest galaxy: it’s 1.7 million light years across (17x the diameter of the Milky Way) and contains ~3.4 trillion solar masses in stars.

“In this video, I’ll take you from farm to factory to show you how chocolate is made, and at the end, we’ll use all the chocolate you’ll see in this video to attempt the Guinness World Record for the world’s largest chocolate bar.”

The Computer That Helped Win World War II. “…it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the fascination of a Colossus at work: its sheer bulk and apparent complexity; the fantastic speed of thin paper tape round the glittering pulleys…”

Do you remember the video I posted last summer of YouTuber Benn Jordan where he “uploaded a picture of a bird to a bird and then downloaded the bird picture from the bird”? So cool. Jordan is back with more data encoding tricks in his latest video, There Are Files Stored in This Video (or: How To Hide Shit In Media).

Here’s his intro, which sounds completely bonkers but he demonstrates everything he says he’s going to:

This video is a very deep dive on all of the different ways that you can covertly send and receive data. I’m going to show you how to secretly store encrypted files in music that sounds completely normal to the human ear. I even made a little web app where somebody could paste a link to a Spotify song and it unlocks a completely secret separate audio stream. I’m going to show you how you can send and receive encrypted messages via ultrasound with no cell service or Wi-Fi required by turning your phone into a modem. We’re going to be exploiting Meta’s copyright protection to store ebooks inside Instagram videos. And I’m going to show you how I stored, hosted, and shared malware inside of a harmless Facebook photo of my [dog].

This is a pretty dense video and, I’m going to be honest, some of it went right over my head. But it is also genuinely mind-blowing and makes me want to watch a Sneakers-esque hackers movie where the characters do things like:

So if you ever want to send someone a selfie over PA system in a place with no Wi-Fi or cell service, I guess we’ve made that possible today.

If you want to play around with any of the stuff in the video, Jordan coded a bunch of demos and tools and put them up on his website.

I also ran across this recently: a system that can transfer data at 190 KB/s between two phones by pointing the camera of one phone at a QR video.

Tags: audio · Benn Jordan · remix · video

Lidar and other discoveries continue to show that the Amazon rainforest was home to a “sprawling ancient civilization much bigger than researchers expected” (possibly up to 3 million people around 100-300 CE).

Hey folks. I just wanted to hop in here quickly to let a cat out of a bag: I am in the midst of moving. Not going to get into the wheres, whys, and hows right now; there’s a bigger post coming at some point about all of that. I’m excited and anxious about the transition (it’s a pretty big one), but it’s been taking up a lot of time, energy, and bandwidth that I would usually be putting into KDO.

The move is happening in early Sept, and I’m probably going to be taking some time off between now and then (timing tbd) to get everything packed & organized, spend time with family & friends before I go, and generally not run myself completely into the ground. Thanks for your patience & understanding; I’m excited to get back to focusing on the site in mid-Sept. ✌️

Tags: Jason Kottke · kottke.org

This is an old list but still interesting: the 12 most linguistically influential American movies since 1980. If you were compiling a list of linguistically influential movies since 2000, what would be on it?

Tressie McMillan Cottom’s reading list for fighting back against Big Tech. “Put simply, there is too much money, some of it too untraceable, giving a small group of unelected people too much power over the people.”

Emily Wilson takes another crack at a critique of Nolan’s “visually stunning, emotionally empty” Odyssey. “Verbally, we are told that people matter; visually, we are shown that they do not.”